Katie's Days

I remember when Carly was three weeks old. We slept until noon, then we sat on the tiny navy blue Ikea couch that comprised exactly one-third of the pieces of furniture in our living room, watched Trading Spaces while she napped on my chest...I left the house maybe twice and each time it took a good hour and a half to get ready. My days all ran together in this kind of blissed-out baby haze. It was the first time I didn't have a job or three, so every day was a novelty and felt like a Saturday.

Now, I've been living in Saturday-land for more or less the last seven years, so that's not really new. Carly's school schedule keeps us in line as far as days go (for at least the next week and a half) and I can't imagine sleeping until noon. Not only due to the amount of damage my adorable middle child would inflict on the tenuous organization of my home with that many unsupervised hours, but also because - knock on wood - Katie Claire actually sleeps for most of the night. For now! I'm sure at some point she may try and flip her days and nights, or go through a growth spurt and we'll be up more, but now it's three, maybe four, times in the night she starts wiggling a lot. Getting out of the house doesn't take two hours, thank goodness. All of this is due to the fact that this baby is the world's easiest child. So sweet to her mama!

This photo was taken yesterday...on Try It Again Tuesday. I needed a new driver's license, so we ran all around Carteret County making that happen. This was our well-deserved Starbucks pit stop right after Katie had a snack and fell back asleep. A funny thing about her is that when she's asleep, she is ASLEEP and will not wake up no matter what. It's beginning to be true of her awake, as well, though. She fights sleep - that's actually really funny to watch because her little eyes will be rolling back in her head and she'll just shake it off and look around with great BIG eyes, like "what? I'm not asleep!" =)

So again, due to the fact that Katie's a chill baby except when it's time for her to fall asleep (especially in her carseat), my biggest challenges so far have been keeping up with the house to a level that allows me to remain sane and relatively nice, and giving the big girls enough attention. That is particularly important with Bree because she is a Leo and will seek attention any way she can get it, even if it means making GIANT MESSES ALL DAY LONG that I then have to spend five hours cleaning up. Today I just popped Katie in her carrier and took care of the disaster that was the upstairs of our creaky little house...but of course during those five hours Bree was not having the one on one time she is used to, so among other adventures, she mixed up her cup of leftover soy milk with the six ounces of expressed milk (SIX!!! Do you know how long that takes?!) I had waiting for Katie's intro to the bottle, with a bowl of baking soda I was preparing to sprinkle on the shampooed-but-still-smelly carpet of the upstairs closet...heaven help me.

So while I'm figuring out how to get out of that cycle, I did hit upon a lovely solution to that awful time of day right before dinner. The pool! Big girls love it! Then they eat a great dinner and go to bed easily, which is such a wonderful thing. Not like tonight, for example, when I've spent the last two hours chasing Bree back to her bed. It's really a good thing she's so darn cute.

So, back to the babes. This is her three week portrait. I think she looks a lot like her daddy and I swear to you she's going to be smiling at us any day now. She makes this little face when her sisters come around and when she first wakes up. She's also pretty much out of her newborn sized clothes as you can see here.

As of right now, we don't really have a nap or eating schedule. I just feed her when she's hungry and she sleeps when she's tired. She gets a bath every day, but not always at the same time. She does tummy time and outside time each day, whenever I think of it....the life of a third child. =)

And which sister does she favor? Well...this is Carly at about six or seven weeks - I can tell she's older because the baby acne has disappeared.

And here is Bree at three weeks.

What do you think? I think she's leaning heavily toward Carly-ish-ness. It's going to be fun to watch and see.